$20 gas gets me much, much, much further than $20 in eating high carb prepared food when riding my bike between point A and B.
Let’s see. Assuming:
Gasoline costs $3/gallon
A car gets 30 miles per gallon
That works out to where $20 buys 6.7 gallons or 200 miles.
Assuming cycling burns 50 calories per mile, you’re looking at 10,000 calories of excess energy usage to travel 200 miles.
At 1700 calories per pound for dry pasta or dry rice, that’s about 5.8 lbs of pasta or rice, probably less than $10 in most places.
Or course, people eat other things, and will likely increase their consumption of everything in a ratio proportional to their increased caloric needs, not just adding carbs to some kind of baseline amount of food for their BMR, so I wouldn’t expect it to be that cheap in real life. But there’s a little bit of wiggle room to work with for anyone cooking their meals at home.
Let’s see. Assuming:
That works out to where $20 buys 6.7 gallons or 200 miles.
Assuming cycling burns 50 calories per mile, you’re looking at 10,000 calories of excess energy usage to travel 200 miles.
At 1700 calories per pound for dry pasta or dry rice, that’s about 5.8 lbs of pasta or rice, probably less than $10 in most places.
Or course, people eat other things, and will likely increase their consumption of everything in a ratio proportional to their increased caloric needs, not just adding carbs to some kind of baseline amount of food for their BMR, so I wouldn’t expect it to be that cheap in real life. But there’s a little bit of wiggle room to work with for anyone cooking their meals at home.